From Hilde, with Love

This story of real characters is told via two timelines. The more menacing tells us that Hilde (Liv Lisa Fries) has been apprehended by the Nazis and imprisoned for assisting her husband Hans (Johannes Hegemann) as he worked for a free Germany in wartime Berlin. The second thread shows us their summer of love. We meet them, and their friends, and follow their love affair through to their wedding and their conceiving the child that she is now doomed to bear in custody. Luckily, despite a fairly terrifying start to her incarceration and the process of her childbirth, Hilde - hitherto a dental nurse - manages to get along with her warder Miss Kühn (Lisa Wagner) and gradually befriend her and ensure that she is permitted to nurture her new born boy. With these two storylines gradually intertwining, we learn that the brutality of their government was not reserved for their foreign enemies, and that any rebellious instincts from their own citizens were robustly dealt with. Fries delivers really quite strongly here, but perhaps because of the way the story unfolds there is really a distinct lack of threat throughout, and I missed that. Indeed, the whole film has a bit of the television drama look to it that I felt fell a bit flat as it progressed. Perhaps it is just assuming that those watching already know how ghastly and toxic the regime was, but the film rather undercooks that element and as such this does struggle to sustain the sense of peril that she must have faced. It’s naturally photographed with their bucolic existence powerfully contrasted with their imprisonment and the narration, sourced from letters, does provide an authenticity to their struggle. This is a good looking piece of cinema, but dramatically it does come up a bit short.